May 8, 2007

McCain, Obama, Clinton, and Giuliani have all called for more soldiers for them to play with when they come President. Why? We spend 48-49% of the world's military budget. We have near absolute air supremacy and, in the unlikely event that an enemy tank army ever takes the field to challenge our tanks again, the outcome is likely to be the same as in 1991 in Desert Storm. Okay, we don't have enough Boots on the Ground to permanently occupy a deeply hostile country. For example, we can't occupy Iraq and Iran simultaneously, but maybe, just maybe, that's a good thing. Especially considering that some of the top Presidential candidates are not what you'd call the most emotionally stable people in the world ... So, where could they get more cannon fodder? The most obvious source are low IQ recruits. From 1992-2004, only about 1% of new recruits were let in with IQs below the 30th percentile (92) on the military's AFQT entrance test. The Army recently boosted that to 4%, and the Army Reserve appears to be even laxer. But does the modern military want cannon fodder or do they want effective warriors? The problem is that -- as the military has exhaustively documented over the decades -- the lower the recruit's IQ, the less danger he poses to the enemy and the more danger he poses to himself and his comrades.

43 comments:

Why? We spend 48-49% of the world's military budget. We have near absolute air supremacy and, in the unlikely event that an enemy tank army ever takes the field to challenge our tanks again, the outcome is likely to be the same as in 1991 in Desert Storm.

Because every single one of the candidates you mention believe that it is our job to police the world in one way or another, and that is impossible without more troops.

Why a bigger military? Why even ask that question? With all due respect you are simply out of your depth in military affairs.

Military spending is below norms: about 3% of GDP. By contrast Reagan spent about 5%-6% of GDP. In WWII our spending was about 40% of GDP. Our military was cut by George Bush and Clinton by about 45%. Even under Clinton's cowardly "peacekeeping deployments" the military particularly the Navy and Air Force were stressed to the max. Containing Saddam in particular put a great deal of stress on the undermanned Navy. Spending enough money will allow us to get back to Reagan levels with an all-volunteer military and still have high standards. However we must have a political commitment to winning not feminized losing as Dems push. There are many men who desire something other than sitting in a cubicle all day listening to politically correct yapping. Spend the money and have high pay and we'd have no trouble finding the best even at Reagan levels as long as we commit to winning.

Great Moments in US Military History: Haitian thugs riot at Port Au Prince and the Navy under Clinton's orders sails away. A policy more deliberately put to encourage others to find us weak could not be imagined.

Why a bigger military?

*Piracy. The Horn of Africa, areas off Indonesia, and the Philippine Seas are all infested with Islamic Pirates. Since these are the main shipping lanes for our global trade networks and the locals can't keep them Pirate Free we need a MUCH bigger Navy. Under Reagan we had an 800 ship navy, we are now down to about 400.

*Spreading threats absent the Cold War leash. Not just Afghanistan but Pakistan, Iran, Saudi, and other nations in and around the ME present a profound threat. If you want something between abject surrender and nuking them to hell and gone you need the ability to go in and break things big time. This means a much bigger Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and in particular logistics which had been outsourced in the Bush 1- Clinton years to folks like Blackwater and Haliburton.

This threat is non-trivial since the Madrassa system in Pakistan is a factory for jihad, and Pakistani diaspora spreads this stuff around the globe including the US and particularly the UK. Where jihad gets continually refreshed from the Pakistani pipeline.

[Can we shut off the Pakistani pipeline? Yes but it's politically impossible since it would requires closed borders, deportation of most Pakistanis and internment of the rest. It's easier to spend the money for a larger military.]

*Rising threats from China. Which itself is unstable, wracked by corruption, unchanged from an "Emperor-led" bureaucracy with Party leaders instead of nobles, great misery on the populace, and about 50-75 million young men who due to selective sex abortions will never find wives or girlfriends (120 men for every 100 women).

*Need to rescue Europe from itself. Europe is very rich, very old, and very weak. Spain could not fight off a Moroccan or Algerian invasion any more than France could. But it is in the US interest not to let that happen even though it is tempting. Our naval and air forces currently could not interdict a mass invasion. The people of North Africa are very poor, know the Europeans cannot defend themselves, and see all that stuff and slaves for the taking.

And finally ...

Deterrence against getting nuked.

MAD worked reasonably well against the Soviets in a stable, conservative duopoly with neither side wanting an all-out confrontation and having a return address for any trouble.

None of which applies to non-state actors who are plausibly deniable and have no territory or return address to defend and welcome an apocalypse. Particularly as bin Laden has argued over and over again (Khomeni too for that matter) that the US is weak, a paper tiger, unable to really fight for all it's weapons, and easily cowed by a few casualties. That the US can be attacked with impunity because we are weak.

We cannot deter Al Qaeda. We can however with a large military and continual demonstrations of it's use (by pre-emptive removal of dangerous regimes) convince folks like the Pakistani Generals that it's really NOT a good idea to have Al Qaeda close to control of nukes because the American trigger finger is itchy.

Because the folks we need to deter is a large variety of unstable states with terrorists all around them and right there (while we are far away). Therefore we also must be right by their side, seen to be dangerous, and make constant demonstrations of why it's unwise to poke us. In other words install FEAR of regimes that have nuclear material.

Steve when it comes to military matters you just fail. We live in a dangerous world. Neither Hitler nor Tojo ever succeeded in bringing down Skyscrapers in NYC or hitting the Pentagon. The enemy has asymmetrical capabilities and a much bigger military (than our currently much smaller historically military) allows us to sever their ability to strike by separating them from covert state support.

Glaivester -- our figures for worlds military spending are skewed by the total collapse of European/NATO military spending and Russia's implosion. Canada at one point had the fourth largest Navy, it's now down to IIRC less than 20 ships (if that). Britain's Royal Surrender Navy has fewer ships than the Belgian Coast Guard.

Meanwhile non-state actors are convinced we will never do anything other than cower and surrender if hit. Spending the money for a bigger military is part of the means to convince hostile nations otherwise.

I was going to disagree with you until I read what Anonymous said. Piracy?

But I'll thrown this in: instead of building our armed force, why not allied ourselves with another country that has Boots on the Ground? I'll let you come to the conclusion as to what country that has lots of BOTG.

Like it or not, we are the world's lone great power. You may or may not like the military aspect of that power, but that's irrelevant. Most people don't have a problem with our economic power, our cultural influence, our media influence, and all the rest. What's that? You don't like our economic power? You'd rather us have the economic footprint of Indonesia?

Point being: so long as we're the richest country on the planet, we're a target - period. And we need a military to defend us from the unwanted attention that sort of power will bring. We need a military willing to exert our will on countries full of crazies, and that means boots on the ground.

A larger army - even mandatory conscription - wouldn't just solve that problem, it would reduce the feminization, boy-ification of the American man.

Anti-anonymous, you don't believe in piracy? Do a little experiment: do a search for memoirs of a person sailing around the world by themselves. There's some in the 50s, a bunch in the 60s and 70, fewer in the 80s, and then almost none. Gosh, why do you think that could be? It happens even faster with tales of women sailing around the world.

Guys, pull your head out of Faux News. While we waste hundreds of billions in Iraq, Europe, Russia, and China are building their infrastructure and their financial might. They build factories and bullet trains and we build strip malls to sell foreign-made crap.

Think about Iraq for a second. If that was anything other than a siphon from the wallet of the American taxpayer to well-connected corporations, wouldn't we try to win that thing? Wouldn't we set up 24 hour electronic survellance to monitor the guys that set up the IEDs? Wouldn't we pay any willing Iraqi male a decent salary to work on public works projects? Wouldn't we run the government ourselves for a decade or two instead of mucking around with "elected" losers?

Yes, Anonymous, piracy is a big fucking problem, so big that we have to increase military budget to 6% of GDP in order to combat them. I sure miss all those memoirs from, presumably, Americans who got their life snuffed out by pirates at sea.

One of best methods for spoting a bed-wetting conservative neocon type is that they want a "big military," and all the expense and loss of life that goes along with it, but they don't want to discuss the low cost, safe, and effective solution against terrorism - reducing immigration, especially immigration from substantially Muslim countries.

It IS amazing that the mainland US was never attacked in WWII, but now small groups are blowing up building inside NYC. However, you can’t blame the success of the 9/11 bombers on the condition of the US military. The problem is that we have let too many hostiles into our country and we don't control our borders.

And such attacks are still happening. Just last week, as we are knee deep in shit in Iraq another group of "immigrants" was caught planning an attack in New Jersey. See Immigrants Plan Attack.

It is very simple. The military was not going to stop 9/11 and they are not going to stop future attacks of a similar nature. Our operations in Iraq are completely irrelevant to these types of attacks.

In fact, our military is busy PROTECTING Bosnia/Albania, where these potential terrorist came from, you neocon fools!

So, as long as I see no real concern about immigration I will know that all these claims "atomic bombs in the harbor" are just crap – bait for bubba. Maybe once the simple and cheap measures are tried, if there is still concern, we can discuss additional build up of the military, but somehow I doubt it will be necessary. As Steve has already pointed out, our military is already huge compared to the rest of the world including China.

And it is the potential effectiveness of immigration control that is just what the bed-wetters are worried about because they really want to use the military for purposes other than defending the united states.

Steve -- With all due respect you are simply out of your depth in military affairs.

He wasn't, unless he read your post in which case he's knee deep in bullsh--.

Just to pick one example at random:

Great Moments in US Military History: Haitian thugs riot at Port Au Prince and the Navy under Clinton's orders sails away. A policy more deliberately put to encourage others to find us weak could not be imagined.

Those Haitian thugs were armed and funded by the U.S. Had we simply left Haiti alone, we would not have had our "weakness" moment and we would have saved money. Also, Haiti would be better off, but that['s irrelevant to you.

Why do people's anger at Bush over Iraq and immigration (both of which I share) translate into them automatically going what they presume to be 180 degrees in the opposite direction seemingly automatically?

The first "anonymous" (people really need to pick a goddamned name, even a fake one) was right, and just because you (1) hate neocons, and (2) they take a generally aggressive stance on defense does not mean that you have to start acting like an isolationist and pretending that there aren't threats to the US that we have to deal with in some way.

The thing that's clear now (and should have been clear to everyone at the time, including myself, I admit) is that the democratization strategy was idiotic and nearly insane. But that doesn't mean the Islamic world isn't a threat. The question is how to deal with it.

For myself, I like Steve's separation idea, or Larry Auster's notion of containment, similar to how we treated communism. Of course this means cutting off Islamic immigration (being aggressive on defense also doesn't mean you have to agree with the neocons or Bush on immigration, you'll be happy to learn), and it means trying to isolate and separate ourselves from entanglement within the Muslim world, but it also means that we will have to sometimes engage in/contribute to wars or interventions similar to Korea or Greece in the late 40s to halt the spread of Islam.

Try walking and chewing gum at the same time, folks. It's not that hard.

One other point: Although I think expanding our ground forces would be a waste of money (since we probably won't be fighting drawn-out counter-insurgencies in the near future), it is crucial that we spend what we need to to make sure we have the world's best weaponry. Steve's mentions are current air superiority, but doesn't mention how tenuous this is.

Air forces from countries like India have beaten ours in war games, and several countries are making planes as advanced as our current fighters (most of which were designed 20 or 30 years ago). You can't improvise advanced military technology overnight; if we don't maintain our edge, other countries will overtake us, and our ability to deter real wars (not just the relative brush fires we are fighting now) will suffer.

The Cold War was a phony. Russia was not in the big leagues military. The self-interested propaganda of the military/industrial complex (on both sides) made it seem so.

When are we going to realize that criminals are a tiny population in the world, easily handable by a minimal government -- unless the criminals combine in that popular criminal conspiracy known as big government?

Big governments have caused all the wars.

Big governments lower confiscatory taxes on us all, in order to fund/prepare for their wars.

Big governments create a courtier class and a courtier culture - taking over education and brainwashing the young and gullible (when it isn't actively sending them overseas to be slaughtered for corporate interests) into believing Government Is The Solution To All Problems And Never The Cause Of Any Problem. The cause of any problem is always: poor funding!

Military welfare queens act like they broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And are disappointed they couldn't break it twice over.

The State is a con game, preventing human cooperation and causing problems in order to rake in the coin (just like any criminal). Lew Rockwell pawns all you neo-kahnservatives here:

Guys seem to be missing one of Stves main points,namely the quality of the men we suit up! There is a very strong impetus among white males to leave home,have adventure,test oneself,shoot guns,get toughened up,and yes,fuck foreign girls! This ambition for adventure(look at the ad campaigns of the military,note how the Marines are always ahead of the Army in filling quotas)which coupled with a very powerful economic incentive tobetter yourself,has brought a lot of hi quality dudes into the service. The Neo-Con filth is cynically,and desperately,using as well as depleting that culture. There are still plenty of guys who want to join,but as the war drags on and as even the apolitical young see what a rotten bunch of lying pieces of shit are running our country(Oh! Barack we need you! heh heh)those guys will be less and less inclined to,as they so indelicately put it,accept the attentions of the Green Weenie! The army will have to accept guys with lower ability and higher negatives like,for example,Juan the trigger man for the Latin Retards. Now....as for pirates,I have this vision of jerry seinfeld in a puffy shirt...

So just so we can be clear: because the word "pirate" is funny, none of you care about protecting shipping? And you certainly don't give a flying fuck about your female descendents' ability to move freely in the rest of the world without a male escort? Good to know.

Try walking and chewing gum [immigration & military] at the same time, folks. It's not that hard.

Reasonable point.

Short answer, I really believe that the threats we face now are not conducive to a conventional military solution. However, there is more to it that than.

It is very hard to jump on the military bandwagon when we are not taking easier, lower cost, and safer measures against the threats you discuss.

For example, if china is really a threat we should modify our trade stance with them because, as of now, we are just paying the tooling cost for them to build up their industrial base.

Similarly, if we really care about the middle east we should reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

And obviously, if we care about domestic terrorism we should shut down immigration.

But we do none of these. In fact, Bush and the business community (read WSJ) fight against ever one of these policies, then demand more money for the military when things go FUBAR. And they demand more lives to be lost while they sit behind the keyboard.

I can no longer support that.

There are few signs of change in the Republican party so far, but maybe as they start to see the Republican “Holocaust” heading towards them in 2008 they are going to run, not walk, from the war in Iraq. We shall see.

Point is, until I see I change in the Republican party I am going to through my (small) weight behind netroots.

So, if the dems want to jack up taxes on the rich I am all for it. I hope the hit some big corporate republican donors first.

If they want to clamp down on carbon emission then great.

I also hope they shove gay marriage down the throat of those Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israel.

Since I support virtually none of Bush's policies at this time (which are the neocon/WSJ policies as well) I have little or nothing to lose.

Yes, lone women sailors piloting shipping vessels through the Bering Strait must be protected from Captain Black and his Islamic mateys.

Avast ye!

And of course bathing beauties on sailboards should cast an eye 'round. They could be abducted from Myrtle Beach's dangerous shores in a heartbeat!

Uncle Sugar must sacrifice billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives - our blood and treasure - to protect Veronica on her boogieboard, and Dagny Taggart on her one-person-crew oil tanker!

BTW, the whole pirate thing is not that we think pirates are good, but rather:

a) the resrouces necessary for fighting piracy would not even be a blip on our military budget. It is noise.

b) Bush is not talking about doing anthing about it, nor is anyone else. I am virtually certain that no resources would be devoted to fighting piracy when the Iraq war is taking place and the "threat from Iran" is looming.

And dude, a white american woman can't even walk into many parts of the united states, or various border towns in mexico with fear of rape. Let's start cleaning up those places first.

Russell: Moby (the "technomusic guy") once advocated that liberals infiltrate conservative message boards (I believe this was before blogs were popular) and post either nasty lies (e.g., that Bush had once paid for a girlfriend's abortion) or uncomfortable truths (e.g., that Bush advocated illegal immigrant amnesty) in order to divide conservatives and rile up anti-Bush sentiment. So in some conservative circles the term "moby" is now synonymous with the more well-known term "troll."

daveg, you said "I'm not going back until I feel the love again". That's exactly how I feel. Not only is Bush wrong, but congress is filled with dittohead Republicans who wont call him on his bad policies.

Bush is wrong on immigration.Bush is wrong on nation building in Iraq.Bush is wrong on spending increases.Bush is wrong on constitutional freedoms.

The man is not a conservative, he's an embarrassment. He gives a bad name to all things conservative. Anyone who still backs him is either in the top 0.1% or the bottom 28%.

Before we tackle making it safe for unaccompanied women to sail around the world, I propose a pilot project, to test the feasibility of the enterprise. Let's make it safe for unaccompanied women to walk around after dark in Anacostia, first. If that works out, we can talk about the open seas.

More broadly, maybe we do need a big military stick, but you can't prove it with 9/11. What that demonstrated wasn't a need for more boots on the ground or fighter jets, but rather more skeptical border-control officers and more demanding visa requirements.

Thanks for the tip Russell. I will definitely try that. It can't hurt.

BTW, one of the labels Steve put on this post was "cannon fodder." I think that explains how a lot of us feel.

I am not going to be financial/political/ethnic cannon fodder for the WSJ crowd anymore.

I really don't think a "business" publication like the WSJ should carry so much weight on geopolitical matters anyway, especially when they have demonstrated a complete lack of qualifications based on their track record.

And here is why the paleocon crowd must take the war head on first, at the expense of virtually all other issues - because it is THE uniting issue of the neocon bizarro-conservatives that have taken over the Republican party. The neocons will "sacrifice" virtually all other conservative issues in order to preserve the Iraq war and their ability to threaten and initiate other wars, assuming they were sincere on the other conservative issues in the first place.

How can I say this? Well, first read national review online and the weekly standard. That should be enough. But, more to the point, look at the pull-out-all-the-stops support they gave to Joe Leiberman, who is horrible on virtually all other conservative issue.

And, in order to drive a stake into the heart of the neocon war machine, it is not enough to elect democrats. You must elect expressly antiwar democrats. And the only group that has shown itself to be even marginally successful at doing so is netroots.

That is why, for now, paleocons must support netroots and expel the "police the world" bunch from both parties.

It won't work on the presidential level - they have already bought and paid for each of the leading candidates, although obama and romney are slightly less bought and paid for.

But at the congressional level, antiwar works - at least for now. Pro-war democrats can lose in the primaries, and pro war Republicans are going to lose in the generals if we are still in Iraq.

The push is going to come from there and there alone. That is why I have become a big netroots supporter for now.

Moderate Republicans gave President Bush a blunt warning on his Iraq policy at a private White House meeting this week, telling the president that conditions needed to improve markedly by fall or more Republicans would desert him on the war.

The White House session demonstrated the grave unease many Republicans are feeling about the war, even as they continue to stand with the president against Democratic efforts to force a withdrawal of forces through a spending measure that has been a flash point for weeks.

Participants in the Tuesday meeting between Mr. Bush, senior administration officials and 11 members of a moderate bloc of House Republicans said the lawmakers were unusually candid with the president, telling him that public support for the war was crumbling in their swing districts.

One told Mr. Bush that voters back home favored a withdrawal even if it meant the war was judged a loss. Representative Tom Davis told Mr. Bush that the president’s approval rating was at 5 percent in one section of his northern Virginia district.

“It was a tough meeting in terms of people being as frank as they possibly could about their districts and their feelings about where the American people are on the war,” said Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois, who took part in the session, which lasted more than an hour in the residential section of the White House. “It was a no-holds-barred meeting.”

Several of the Republican moderates who visited the White House have already come under political attack at home for their support of Mr. Bush and survived serious Democratic challenges in November.

The idea that we can prevent the nuking of one-three of our cities by border patrols alone is laughable.

Yes Bush is terrible on Immigration and open borders. Yes he's a loser on many other issues. And yes we can do more to secure the borders.

But there is no physical way to keep everyone out. Much less the drugs, guns, money etc. that get smuggled up there along with the people. There's a Dashiell Hammett Continental Op story "Corkscrew" that could have been written yesterday on the issue of illegals being moved over the border. It was written in the 1920's.

Having a bigger military (and the will to use it) deters Pakistan and Iran and North Korea from playing footsie with bin Laden. Who would like nothing more than to nuke us. Or Iran using Hezbollah as a deniable cutout to do the same.

The NYT has a story about how a working group of CIA/State/Pentagon mid-level officers have conducted exercises to respond to the nuking of an American city or three. They figure they can find nuclear fingerprints from known samples of Russian and North Korean materials but not Pakistani or Iranian. And that's leaving alone a dirty bomb with Polonium 210.

There is no way to secure the border 100% all the time. While yes you can secure the border against "most" illegals (not that Dems would ever do it, some Reps might).

If you think we can live in isolationist Fortress America you're as delusional as Pat Buchanon. Chear air travel and globalization means a jihadi can be in Waziristan one day and in NYC the next, or Albanian Muslims living in this country for 23 years can access jihadi scum on the internet.

Unless you can convince America to give up it's Toyotas, Hondas, Sonys, Toshibas, Sanyos, Hitachis etc. we need a strong Navy to protect the sealanes. They don't do it themselves (piracy of container ships is a huge problem). Good luck with turning America into North Korea. Global trade means a global navy to police and protect it. Which is separate from 9/11 true.

Bottom line: want an alternative to nuke em all or surrender, you need a much bigger military. The world is dangerous and filled with failing states and trans-national jihadis. Not everything has to look like Iraq. Go in, break it, they own it. After about 40-50% of their fighting men are dead.

The KKK didn't fight the Union Army because about 40% of men age 17-40 were dead in the Civil War.

Al Qaeda is not going away. Pakistan is not going away. Iran is not going away. They are all committed to our destruction for religious reasons. Khomeni told reporters on the plane to Tehran he didn't care at all about the Iranian nation or people. Only Islam and the Caliphate.

How are you going to "contain" Western Europe which is filled with Muslims? Or Malaysia or Indonesia? How are you going to contain Muslims here who can find jihadi how-tos on the Internet? Contain Al Qaeda? Iran? It's like containing Starbucks or McDonald's. Globalization cuts both ways idiots.

There IS one alternative to military spending increases (which pale to losing one-three cities, but hey that's just me). Covert networks to counter-terror. 9/11 happens, don't invade. A "mysterious" terror network nukes all of Afghanistan and Pakistan. President sends his regrets, can't figure out WHO could have done something like that. Basically what Putin does on a larger scale. Funny how all his critics fall out of windows or drink Polonium Tea.

The problem with that is command and control. Our people have zilch experience in covert ops. Ever since the Church Commission shut down that part of the CIA. The CIA consists of connected trophy wives like Laurie David uh Valerie Plame and part-time State folks like Joe Wilson. We simply could not execute such a strategy.

Yes the military won't "stop" terrorism. We won't "stop" every illegal coming in either. We can stop a great deal of them with tight borders and keep failing states from playing nuclear footsie with a big and dangerous military.

UNLESS: you want to exist on the goodwill of Osama, the Mullahs, and the Taliban. Not the call I'd make but most of you seem delusional.

DaveG -- Yes some Reps are scared. On the other hand no one I mean no one in the public wants a defeat by Al Qaeda and Iran on the US Military. THAT's a disaster and sticking a "Nuke ME" sign on the US. Defeat is not an option.

Though bombing the crap out of Iran on the way out, same with Pakistan might well be. IF we can get bin Laden. Preferably hung up by his heels on TV for the World to see.

Yes there is. Or you can at least keep 99.99% of the bad guys out. In fact it is easy.

Israel's simple wall has reduced terrorism enormously. A simple wall, and we have oceans. Why do the neocons support a wall for Israel but not the US?

Also, you don't see Israel letting their troop hang around in Lebanon to slowly get picked off. They know that it is futile to do so and care enough about their citizens and solders to get them the hell out of there.

They don't think of their solders as "cannon fodder."

Lawrence Auster (a righteous person if there ever was one) hammers National Review for their tepid response to the NJ terrorists here. You have to ask yourself why does NR go to such lengths to NOT discuss the issue of immigration and border protection when such a topic screams out to be discussed. Three of these terrorists were here illegally and NO discussion of immigration by NR???

Attacking Iraq and Iran to stop terrorism in the US is like spraying the entire outdoors instead of installing screens in your house. It won't work, it wastes money and it damages the environment. And in some ways it creates more "bugs" by inciting more anger against the US.

The neocon agenda is not intended to protect America. In fact, the more instability there is the more power they can grab.

You have to understand that fact in order to have any success in moving forward with a truly conservative plan to protect this country.

As the House prepares to vote again tonight on dealing with the Iraq debacle in the wake of the Pretzelnit's wielding of his mighty veto crayon, Members will have a chance to save some lives.

Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) has won the right to bring an alternative bill (PDF) to the floor for a vote that would mandate the start of a fully-funded redeployment of troops and private contractors from Iraq within 90 days of passage, to be completed within 180 days from the start date.

Will it pass? Probably not. But is it important? Yes it is. It's the first straight-up vote on withdrawal that we'll have had. And more than that, it's a necessary concession to the Out of Iraq and Progressive Caucuses, who had to swallow their pride and make the tough votes in the last round of Iraq funding votes so that the Blue Dogs wouldn't have to break a sweat. This time, the Progressives get their due, win or lose.

Why not call your Representatives and let them know how you want them to vote? Every additional voice counts, and every additional vote increases the political pressure to recognize where the country really is on this question.

[..]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress not to interfere in the conduct of the Iraq war and suggested President George W. Bush would defy troop withdrawal legislation.

A bigger occupation force (boots on the ground) isn't especially important for deterrence. Deterrence against nations is something we have in spades, or rather in silos, tucked under wings of bombers, and sitting in submarines in the ocean. If we get nuked, and believe we know who did it, we will do the 100:1 exchange rate thing, rounding off at the urban population of the country that attacks us.

Occupation forces are only useful for us to occupy someone. We plainly have no stomach for that kind of thing, which suits me fine. So we deter by threatening to blow stuff up and do quick raids.

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